The Cyprus Community Media Centre (CCMC) is hosting a prominent community media activist from India as part of its ongoing advocacy campaign for the recognition of this sector in Cyprus. Entitled ‘Community Media: Giving Voice to the Voiceless’ this public talk followed by discussion will feature a keynote speech by Archana Kapoor, a filmmaker, author and activist. Ms Kapoor is also the publisher of Hardnews magazine, an independent political monthly in India, and founder of the NGO SMART that works with marginalised communities in India. Two years ago Kapoor launched a community radio station in an impoverished rural community outside Delhi. The radio station went on to win a National Award from the Government of India in 2012. Kapoor is also on the governing board of the Community Radio Association, an organisation established in order to promote and lobby for the community radio movement. The event will be followed by a reception. Look forward to seeing you there! Download your invitation here.

The Cyprus Community Media Centre (CCMC) just announced the winners of its Incentive Awards for Media Collaboration at a ceremony at the Home for Cooperation in Nicosia (22 January 2013). The Incentive Awards Sceheme, launched in September 2012 under the MultiCommMedia project, aims to promote professional collaboration between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot media. The recipients were NRG TV with Media Works for a project on Cyprus nightlife across the divide, and CyprusNews.eu with Baris Gazetesi for Voices & Echoes – an online news portal.

Have a look at our gallery of photos from today’s ceremony – we can’t wait to see the collaborations in action!

The Incentive Awards were launched in September 2012 under the MultiCommMedia project in order to promote professional collaboration between the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot media, and to initiate a discussion about the importance of a common media space for all Cypriots.

At CCMC we believe wholeheartedly that the exchange of content as well as dialogue among media across the island can play a crucial role in helping all communities understand each other’s daily realities and concerns.

We can’t wait to announce the new partnerships, and we are convinced that their work will create new possibilities for cross-community understanding!

And the newly opened Crossroads Cafe will be providing us with the best coffee and cookies in town!

The overall winner in the photo category was “Ageless Joy”, taken by Salih Bahçeci, a student of digital media at London Metropolitan University, while the short clip “An ordinary life of my grandparents” by Andreas Psaltis, a final year pupil at the Grammar School, Nicosia, won the video prize. The two category winners each received an iPad.

There were also honourable mentions for Elly Rousou for the photo entitled ‘Youth has no Age’, and for Yetin Arslan with ‘Fairy-tale Cycle’.

“This is the second year of the DigiMe digital video and photo competition. We at the Representation are happy to support this online event and we do hope that it will carry on with the same success for a few more years to come. Our intention was to to raise awareness of the contribution that older people make to society and I think that the entries to the competition do this quite admirably. It is also clear that these issues, like the environment and climate change in last year’s competition, are obviously of concern to all communities in Cyprus – two-thirds of this year’s entries come from Greek Cypriots and approximately one-third from the Turkish Cypriot community.”

Entries in the DigiMe competition are not judged on artistic merit alone but also on relevance and, crucially, on the impact they have online. This impact, the buzz, which this year’s entries have generated, has been considerable. There were more than 100 entries in all which attracted nearly 3,000 votes on the DigiMe website, more than 2,000 YouTube views and nearly 4,000 likes and comments on Facebook.

The DigiMe competition is managed on behalf of the Representation of the European Commission in Cyprus by the NGO Support Centre and the Cyprus Community Media Centre.

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CCMC likes to get out and about, connecting with all parts of the island. Today we are in Limassol, providing WordPress for Websites training for our member organisations Terra Cypria and the Environmental Studies Centre of Kritou Terra. The functions we are helping with are installing WordPress, choosing themes, creating menus, adding plugins, working with a multilingual website, and much more! Stay connected to CCMC and find out about upcoming training by subscribing to our newsletter here.

With the awesome experience of Buffer Zone Bloggers in mind, CCMC is organising a live-link up with the Council of the European Union to connect Cyprus-based bloggers and online activists with European counterparts participating in an event under the auspices of the Cyprus Presidency of the EU (see previous blog post).

On Thursday 26 July, from 11am to 1pm, the CCMC Community Space will be open for online activists to ‘hang out’ with the bloggers in Brussels through four ‘Google Hangouts’ (http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/).

The four discussions will be structured around the thematic priorities of the Presidency:

– Europe, more efficient and sustainable;
– Europe, with a better performing and growth economy;
– Europe, more relevant to its citizens, with solidarity and social cohesion;
– Europe in the world, closer to its neighbours.

In addition to the Hangouts, bloggers and tweeters are encouraged to use the hashtag – #cy2012eublogs – to propose and comment on the issues under discussion. Please reference @CCMCCyprus if you do connect to the meeting so we can track the contributions coming from the Buffer Zone.

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The Cyprus Presidency has come good on its word – namely to organise an event that will connect European bloggers with their Cypriot counterparts. The efforts of @BlogCyEu and @MyriaAntoniadou have paid off!

Branded under the Twitter hashtag #cy2012eublogs, the meeting will take place on 26 July in the Justus Lipsius building (Press Bar) at the seat of the Council of the EU in Brussels, from 09:30 to 14:00. Registration for the event is now open.

And CCMC will be there, for the simple reason that there is no other organisation in Cyprus that has been more active in promoting the use of social media for citizen participation in decision-making, and because it is the only inter-communal entity in Cyprus that supports activities relating to media which promote reconciliation in Cyprus. Our highly successful Buffer Zone Bloggers event last year was a great success in creating a space for bloggers from across the island to exchange ideas and best practices.

The politics of the division in Cyprus continue to hinder communication between the island’s two main communities, and discussion about the six-month Presidency has focused on the official rhetoric and posturing. Social media, and new media more generally, offer an alternative space for information and opinion exchange, a solution to the problem of effective communication that the mass media have tended to stifle over the years. This event represents an open forum for all Cypriots to have their voices heard at the European level, and offers a basis for constructive dialogue.

CCMC will be hosting a livestream of the event at its premises at the same time, in order to support the interactivity of the event, and open the floor to participants from Cyprus who will not have the chance to participate in Brussels.

The discussion will be structured around the four thematic priorities of the Presidency, but CCMC encourages bloggers and social media users to contribute their own ideas with the aim of broadening the discussion. The priorities, as set by the Cyprus Presidency, are:

Europe, more efficient and sustainable;
Europe, with a better performing and growth economy;
Europe, more relevant to its citizens, with solidarity and social cohesion;
Europe in the world, closer to its neighbours.

CCMC will be sending out more details on the livestream over the coming days, so stay tuned to our social media outlets for more information!